Motorola Wins Patent Battle And Potential For Injunction Against Apple In Germany

Apple is having a tough go of it over in Europe, as they’re involved in various lawsuits in several countries, including one they just lost. Motorola Mobility just scored a big hit against Apple, winning a patent infringement suit against them in Germany.

The lawsuit means Motorola can enforce an injunction against Apple, says Slashgear.com, meaning no sales of iPhones or iPads in Germany. None! Nada. There’s also a similar patent case in the U.S. between the two companies.

In case you were wondering what the patent dispute was about, Slashgear.com says:

“A Germany court ruled that Apple’s cellularly-enabled devices infringe European Patent 1010336, detailing a “method for performing a countdown function during a mobile-originated transfer for a packet radio system” FOSS Patents reports, and deemed an essential component of the GPRS data standard.

So it’s like a flux capacitor, right?

There won’t be a dearth of iProducts in Germany just yet, as the injunction comes with a hefty 100 euro price tag, and no doubt Apple will file an appeal in the case.

The patent system is out of control. It was designed to spur innovation and now patent trolls have destroyed that. We need to burn 99% of all existing patents. You shouldn’t be able to patent something as abstract as a touch-input device. That could be anything!

I agree that there are way too many ‘companies’ that hold general and obscure patents, produce nothing with those patents and just wait to trounce on someone to try to get a payday. However, I certainly wouldn’t consider Motorola to be a troll.

They aren’t trolls, but they are now patenting every minute, abstract or even theoretical thing that goes on in their phones because they have no choice! They need ammunition to fight other companies doing the same thing. that, AND they are often forced to buy these from actual trolls who simply got their first.

In all these patent battles the only people that win are attorneys (like my beautiful wife who works with this sort of thing) and the people who lose are consumers. The Apple/HTC battle here in the US is very interesting, and not good for consumers at all.

Actually, there’s a whole suite of patents from Motorola who INVENTED the concept of the hot-handoff (the switching of a handset from one base station to another base station while maintaining a call that’s inprogress). The “simply counting 3-2-1″ is actually a fairly complicated bit of synchronization between three radio entities, one of which is likely in-motion (hence the need to hand-off to another station, since you’re moving out of range of the previous station).

Apple has been openly refusing to pay the license for Motorola’s patents since 2007 (amongst others), claiming that the fees are excessive for FRAND patents. It’s worth noting that they are the only major smartphone maker to do so. Apple is generally considered a bad business partner that insists on preferential treatment and terms.